Jason M. Jones

In Every Life, A Little Rain…

“Sinner man” by Nina Simone came on in the car this morning while I was backing out of the garage. Arresting. Had to sit and listen until it was done. Want to say they don’t make them like that anymore, only they do. There are plenty of soulful artists out there still making great stuff. It was just that the age of the recording and sound of the track and the unexpectedness of hearing something that good on the radio first thing that produced the affect, made me pause, forced me to sit there until it was finished. But my god, the song was amazing. Long though. I think my wife was wondering what I was doing out there. Or maybe she didn’t notice I was gone. If you’ve never heard it, stop what you’re doing right now and listen to this:

I won’t say it was the best part of my day, but it was one of those moments where I was like, yeah, this is damn good.

On the ride to the station this morning, my daughter told me about the “ka-zee-ba” at her school. I told her it was a gazebo and she denied this until my wife weighed in on my side, and my daughter still insisted that a smaller gazebo was called a “ka-zee-ba.” I love the words children make up when they hear adult words incorrectly.

I got about fifteen hundred words revised on my memoir today, you know the one. Started the revision last week, and already I’m pretty heavily into it. I got a revision of the first chapter done, though that means I’m on to new content, an “interstitial” which describes current day events of what was going on when I posted the memoir, and that’ll take more effort, so really I stopped today because I ran up against a wall and figure I’ll tackle the wall tomorrow. Had a bit of a lack of concentration probably due to staying up later than usual and doing a hundred minutes on my exercise bike and watching Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden. But if felt like a good workout and the movie was great, so I don’t regret it. Based on a Sarah Water’s novel I haven’t read, but the Sarah Water’s novels I have read are great, so it’s likely I’ll get around the one this was based on, Fingersmith, eventually.

On the way out to the garage tonight, after I got the kids home from daycare, I sliced the middle toe on my right foot. I’d gotten them in the house and started to make dinner when I realize I’d left the car in the driveway and the windows open and it was starting to rain again. It had rained pretty hard on the way to the daycare, and it was starting again, only I had taken my shoes off when I came in the house and I was in socks now. Rather than put my shoes back on, I took my socks off to head out barefoot, which was a mistake because guess what! Wet stones are slippery, and there are a few of these at the bottom of our back deck steps. I hit those and my right foot slid across the gray slab and voila, I sliced my toe. By sliced, of course, I mean, I won’t know how bad this is until I wash the blood off, I wonder if I’ll need stitches, do we have any superglue around “sliced.”

When your kids get something like that, you go right into parent mode to comfort them. When you get something like that yourself and your kids are around, you go straight into the parenting mode of wondering how you’re going to watch them while you clean yourself up. Because they always tend to hurt themselves when you take your eyes off them and can’t come to them right away. Which they did. I ran upstairs to run some water into the tub to clean my foot. There was some black earth and green moss surrounding the cut. Meanwhile, downstairs, they got into a tug of war over one of my sweatshirts and my daughter let go and my son fell to the floor and started crying but he was fine. All the while I’m thinking, dinner’s gonna be late, and I probably don’t need stitches but I hope this doesn’t get infected, and I should probably put some antibiotic ointment on it and a Band Aid, but I have to dry it first and it’s still bleeding so which towel should I use because I don’t want to stain one of the good ones, and god, it hurts to bend my toes. So I grabbed the torn up towel we keep in the bathroom to sop the water off the floor when the kids make a mess at bath time, and I used that to dry the foot and put pressure on my cut and the toe is, ultimately fine, though the Band Aid looks like a used tampon. I slapped some PB and J on a few slices of bread for the kids and cut up some green grapes, and I put rice in the rice cooker and defrosted the chili my wife and I were going to have, and all is right with the world again.